26 / wfmag.cc
Interface
Column“All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at
their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art
really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows
that the work is new, complex, and vital.”- Oscar Wilde
hat last line might comfort
developers whose games have not
been met with ‘overwhelmingly
positive’ reviews. It’s the
penultimate line that gets me,
though. When you play a game, are you
experiencing some sort of external experience- is Detroit: Become Human a game ‘about’
human nature and second-class citizens, or is it
‘about’ provoking the player to think about these
things? Do we consume external narratives
when we play games – is there one definitive
experience – or do we close a feedback loop,
completing an otherwise incomplete piece of
art in the act of playing it? The latter is what
literary reader-response theory believes. And it’s
interesting when you bring that theory to games.
It’s true that games comprise a limited set of
themes and mechanics, and can be described
in factual terms. But they come alive in players’
hands: the ultimate experience of playing a
game cannot exist without a player in the first
place. If games need a subjective human to
realise themselves, there cannot be objective
experiences. No definitive readings or true
reactions. There is only art, blended with the
human interacting with it at the time.
It’s important to remember this when it comes
to critique, particularly when it’s controversial.
Take indie designer Tynan Sylvester’s public
dust-up with Rock, Paper, Shotgun over a
journalist’s interpretation of RimWorld’s code.
The points the journalist made were valid and
formed a coherent, interesting discussion.
Ceci n’est pas
une game
T
“Turn games
one way and
they glitter
with starlight”
But the article was not empirical. The journalist
brought an existing belief-system (that
simulation games define their own world rules,
and force their creators to concretise human
experience in rigid ways) to RimWorld’s code
(an attempt to codify sexuality in C# with a
fun player experience at the end). This, to be
clear, is great: person-meets-art is what almost
all artistic critique is. What’s not great is when
people accept that critique as some sort of
empirical, definable truth. RimWorld is not a
game which furthers existing and oppressive
gender relationships between men and women
or erases bisexual men. It can absolutely be
discussed in the context of a simulation game’s
ethical and essentialist restructuring of infinitely
complex human reality, but it doesn’t change
RimWorld itself. RPS rightly went beneath the
surface and read the symbols. But the resultant
piece is a reflection of the spectator, not of life.
Writing a piece in a games magazine about the
subjectiveness of pieces in games magazines is
ironic. And to be clear, subjectivity doesn’t make
reviews, opinion pieces, or other evaluations
of games any less meaningful. What it does do
is highlight the prismatic quality of what we all
do. Turn games one way, and they glitter with
starlight. Turn them another, and they reflect
the dawn. Whatever you feel about a game –
and whatever critics or players or Metacritic or
whoever else feels about it – remember games
are shiny things, and more often than not what’s
said about them doesn’t objectively reflect the
game. It reflects the gamer. The relationships in an early build of
RimWorld were famously
deconstructed and studied by Rock,
Paper, Shotgun’s Claudia Lo in 2016.LOTTIE BEVAN
Lottie’s a producer and
co-founder of award-
winning narrative
microstudio Weather
Factory, best known for
Cultist Simulator. She’s
one of the youngest
female founders in
the industry, a current
BAFTA Breakthrough
Brit, and founder of
Coven Club, a women
in games support
network. She produces,
markets, bizzes and
arts, and previously
worked on Fallen
London, Sunless
Sea, Zubmariner,
and Sunless Skies
as producer at
Failbetter Games.